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Monday, December 07, 2015

A former Secret Service special agent who had been a member
of the Baltimore Silk Road Task Force was sentenced to 71 months in prison
today on charges of money laundering and obstruction of justice.

Assistant Attorney General Leslie R. Caldwell of the Justice
Department’s Criminal Division, Acting U.S. Attorney Brian Stretch of the
Northern District of California, Chief Richard Weber of the Internal Revenue
Service-Criminal Investigation (IRS-CI), Special Agent in Charge David J.
Johnson ofFBI’s San Francisco Division,
Special Agent in Charge Michael P. Tompkins of the Department of Justice Office
of the Inspector General’s Washington, D.C., Field Office and Special Agent in
Charge James E. Ward of the Department of Homeland Security Office of the Inspector
General’s Atlanta Field Office made the announcement.

U.S. District Judge Richard Seeborg of the Northern District
of California sentenced Shaun W. Bridges, 33, of Laurel, Maryland, in San
Francisco following his guilty plea to one count of money laundering and one
count of obstructing justice.Judge
Seeborg also ordered Bridges to forfeit $651,000.

Between 2012 and 2014, Bridges was assigned to the Baltimore
Silk Road Task Force, a multi-agency group investigating illegal activity on
the Silk Road, a covert online marketplace for illicit goods, primarily
drugs.Bridges’s responsibilities
included, among other things, conducting forensic computer investigations in an
effort to locate, identify and prosecute targets, including Ross Ulbricht, aka
Dread Pirate Roberts, who ran the Silk Road from the Northern District of
California.

As part of his guilty plea, Bridges admitted to using
account information that he obtained during the January 2013 search and arrest
of Curtis Green, a customer support representative on Silk Road, to reset
passwords and pins of various accounts on Silk Road and move approximately
20,000 bitcoin, at the time worth approximately $350,000, from those accounts
into a bitcoin “wallet” that Bridges controlled.When Ulbricht learned that Green’s access to
Silk Road had been used to transfer bitcoin from Silk Road into a wallet,
Ulbricht cancelled Green’s administrator access to Silk Road and attempted to
have him killed in retaliation for the bitcoin thefts.

Bridges admitted that he moved the stolen bitcoin into an
account at Mt. Gox, an online digital currency exchange based in Japan, and
that between March and May 2015, he liquidated the bitcoin into $820,000 in
U.S. currency and had the funds transferred to a personal investment account in
the United States.In June 2014, Bridges
transferred money from the investment account into a personal bank account that
he shared with another person.

Bridges also admitted that he used Green’s access to Silk
Road to steal bitcoin from the site, thereby limiting Green’s access to further
the Baltimore grand jury investigation of Ulbricht and Silk Road.Additionally, Bridges admitted that he made
multiple false and misleading statements to both prosecutors and investigators
in connection with the San Francisco grand jury investigation into his own
illegal acts.

Bridges is the second of two federal agents to be sentenced
in connection with the Baltimore Silk Road Task Force’s investigation into the
Silk Road.Carl M. Force, 46, of
Baltimore, was a special agent with the Drug Enforcement Administration who
pleaded guilty on July 1, 2015, to a three-count information charging him with
money laundering with predicates of wire fraud and theft of government
property, obstruction of justice and extortion under color of official right,
related to his theft and diversion of more than $700,000 in digital currency to
which he gained control as part of undercover role on the Baltimore Silk Road
Task Force.On Oct. 19, 2015, Judge
Seeborg sentenced Force to 78 months in prison.

The FBI’s San Francisco Division, the IRS-CI San Francisco
Division, the Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General and the
Department of Homeland Security Office of the Inspector General in Washington,
D.C., are investigating the case.Assistant U.S. Attorneys Kathryn Haun and William Frentzen of the
Northern District of California and Trial Attorney Richard B. Evans of the
Criminal Division’s Public Integrity Section are prosecuting the case.Assistant U.S. Attorney Arvon Perteet of the
Northern District of California handled the asset forfeiture aspects of the
case.